This book provides an insight not common in history books. A view point almost as if from someone who was there as events unfolded. Totally unbiased,totally entertaining, totally enlightening.
A must-have for any complete library.

A great deal of interesting information...
I wish it had been presented in a more digestible manner.
Some reviewers loved it.
I suspect they might be ardent students of the subject.
For someone less involved but who wanted to be educated it is overwhelming and a disappointment.
It would work much better as a read.

Mann's point in this book is to bring to a wide readership the recent scholarship on the America's prior to Columbus. This is he does, and does well, and the reader is excellent. Still, this may be a book better read than listened to. Necessarily, the author ranges over a wide space both geographically and historically. The strangeness of names of places and people often made it difficult for this lay reader to follow complex passages.

But I heard enough to know this is a worthy and serious book. What's impressive in the end is how much we still don't know, how impressive is the knowledge gained for this place and time over the last 50 years, and how much is argued over between scholars, Native Americans, and enthusiasts when consensus doesn't exist. An excellent account of a time long past that remains so much a mystery despite the excellent work of many in different fields of expertise.

My main criticism, however, is that the author narrates for a long time about a given theory (e.g. that the flora in the Amazon basin was heavily influenced by pre-Colombian human presence) only to then say, that this may not be true after all, that just a few scientists (how respected? what do the leaders of the field think?) who believe so and many oppose them. As a reader you are not given the tools to choose for yourself, since seldom is the evidence that both sides of the debate interpret differently presented.

The problem is that later on is hard to remember if what you heard is a fact, a possibility, or something that only a couple of lunatics believe

It is hence a dangerous book to read, if you really want to learn, rather than just be entertained.

The book was interesting but was too long and repetitive. It would have been better if 2-3 hours were cut. Also, the fact that the native Americans left no written records makes much of this information speculative.

It isn't easy to find an audiobook that both my husband and I will enjoy on a road trip, but this one filled the bill. It's an excellent account, written for the laymen, of the archaeological revelations of the past half century, and the ways in which they have revised our views of early Native Americans and the country that they inhabited. Unfortunately the story told in most textbooks has not kept pace with the current state of the art, so this book fills an important gap for anyone whose information is based, as mine was, on high school and introductory college courses.

This book clearly outlines some amazing accomplishments by the New World's early inhabitants. It is full of information, but the information is provided at a pace and with enough narration that it reamins easy and entertaining to listen to, in contrast with one of my other favorite books, Jared Diamond's Collapse, that require full and undivided attention.